• Actress Daisy Ridley for a scene in which her character, the young heroine Rey, pilots her speeder through a bustling marketplace on the planet Jakku.

• A small galaxy’s worth of tracking dots affixed to Lupita Nyong’o’s face allowed artists at Industrial Light & Magic to transform her into the C.G.I. character Maz Kanata.• Galactic travelers, smugglers, and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle.

• Members of the brain trust behind The Force Awakens: composer John Williams, producer and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, co-writer Lawrence Kasdan, and director and co-writer Abrams, photographed at Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, in Santa Monica.

Goddammit, Disney, I am desperately trying to temper my expectations to avoid reliving '99, but....but...that's Han-fucking-Solo, wry smirk in place, sitting in the captain's chair of the Falcon. I mean, yeah, yeah, the kids look fine and all (get 'em the hell out of Chewie's chair though), but I'll be damned if THAT'S not the Harrison I grew up watching.

Also, those code cylinders weren't limited to Imps - pretty sure there are versions on the rebel XW and snowspeeder pilots as well. Pilot thing maybe?

The pale skin and long black hair was what I imagined Vader would look like before the quick glimpse of his scarred head in Empire.

I think the rogues gallery of space pirates is probably my favorite shot of the bunch. The character designs are all new, while still having feeling familiar.

Meanwhile, there's the dude hanging out in the blacked-out OT Stormtrooper armor in the back... even if that's just a background extra, it's the sort of little thing that helps flesh out the state of the galaxy without ever saying a word.

Also digging the gold droid, somewhat similar to the old Metropolis-style McQuarrie design for C-3PO.

Speaking of which - there is a TFN and SW7N member by the name of "King3000" - who has been vindicated by this Vanity Fair spread. Particularly in regards to Lupita Nyongo's character and one of her background pirates adorned with a black-colored stormtrooper helmet and fur-covered bomber jacket.

VF: Yesterday, we promised new newsletter subscribers an exclusive Star Wars character portrait, but that was before Internet sleuths uncovered all the Annie Leibovitz photographs we had to share. Instead, we’re giving you the above behind-the-scenes image (guys, that’s still big!) and an exclusive first look at Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy’s interview with J.J. Abrams,

VF: Your movie is taking place 30-something years after Return of the Jedi. Are you going to give it some of that fill-in-blanks quality, in terms of whatever’s happened in the Star Wars galaxy across those decades?

JJ: Well, what’s cool is we’ve obviously had a lot of time [during the development process] to talk about what’s happened outside of the borders of the story that you’re seeing.

So there are, of course, references to things, and some are very oblique so that hopefully the audience can infer what the characters are referring to. We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something.

I think that the key is—and whether we’ve accomplished that or not is, of course, up to the audience—but the key is that references be essential so that you don’t reference a lot of things that feel like, oh, we’re laying pipe for, you know, an animated series or further movies. It should feel like things are being referenced for a reason.

VF: Tell me about what it was like working on the new film both as its writer-director and as a hard-core Star Wars fan going back to your childhood.

JJ: Maybe the weirdest moment, which came months after production, was the first time I sat down with John Williams to show him about a half an hour of the movie. I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen [and] that I directed. That’s probably as surreal as it gets in my professional life experience.

VF: The first three Star Wars movies had a certain knowingness, because of the way the characters are, so archetypal, and the way they reference a lot of film history, like Luke gazing out at the two setting suns the way someone would in a John Ford Western. That was such a part of the whole “movie brat” thing in the 70s, that George Lucas was a part of. Did you fool around with any of those kinds of nods at movie history?

JJ: There are a few specific references that are kind of my own little stupid, secret ones. But what I realized early on was it was all about point of view—meaning it’s not like you just objectively throw in a star field or a spaceship or a desert planet or whatever the thing.

The question is, who is that person in that experience? Why does it matter to them? What are they desperate for or afraid of? For me, you could reference all the stuff you want, but the experience of the audience in this is that they’ve got to be sitting with someone who happens to be on-screen going through these experiences.

And then that’s not just a desert planet; it could be the most desperate place in the world. Or that’s not just a spaceship flying by; it could be the greatest, most heroic moment of your life. That, to me, has been the constant struggle: to make sure that none of these things are treated like either they’re a museum piece and we’re trying to honor them or they’re gratuitous and thrown in because, well, it’s a Star Wars movie so you’ve got to put these things in.

I highly encourage everyone to read the full piece, if you haven't already. You can't help but want to root for JJ to crush this movie, and I have more confidence than ever that bringing Kasdan back was absolutely the right call.

I remembered when I saw the original movie I was a little bit confused by the warring factions, because the uniform colors kind of overlapped—both [the rebels and the Empire] had some khakis and olive, and I kind of thought, Now I’m in a position to do something about this. So I made two very, very clean-cut palettes. The Empire is in very cold blacks and grays and metallics and teal blues. The Rebels are in khakis and olives and some oranges—warmer colors. So there are very clear separations and you know who you’re looking at when you see them.

I've never seen them overlapping. Empire was Black, White, Grey. The Rebellion had it's colors.

Yeah, the closest the color palettes ever get are probably the stormtroopers boarding the Tantive IV at the beginning of ANH and then the battle on Hoth in Empire when the rebels were in their snow gear, but still the uniform styling in both cases was very different.